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Topic: Milk in Dough (Read 3831 times)

I was speaking with a pizza shop owner today and he said that the secret to his success was using whole milk in his dough. His ratio is 4 parts water and 1 part milk. What qualities do you suppose milk would impart to dough on its journey toward becoming a crust? Does anyone have any experience with this?

Whole milk has fat, protein, and sugar. I would guess it would affect texture and browning at a minimum. Norma or Peter will be able to give you very percise answers to how it will change things I bet.

I was speaking with a pizza shop owner today and he said that the secret to his success was using whole milk in his dough. His ratio is 4 parts water and 1 part milk. What qualities do you suppose milk would impart to dough on its journey toward becoming a crust? Does anyone have any experience with this?

RE,

I am sure that someone somewhere, even in NYC, is using milk for a NY style pizza but that would be an outlier as far as I can tell. Examples of where I have seen milk used for pizza dough, both in liquid and dry forms, include Greek style pizzas, Donatos (a midwestern pizza chain) pizzas, Round Table pizzas, Chicago thin style pizzas (e.g., Vito's & Nick's) and thick crust pizzas (e.g, the original Pizza Hut pan pizzas and Godfather's pizzas). Dry milk products are also used in pizza dough premixes and in some commercial dough conditioners.

Adding milk to the dough will have textural effects and will increase crust coloration (the lactose in milk and amino acids will participate in the Maillard reactions and also be subject to caramelization). Milk will also impart a dairy note to the pizza but that is likely to be overwhelmed by other flavors on the pizza, including the cheese flavors. Of course, milk will increase the amount of calcium and other minerals in the pizza.

I use 3% buttermilk powder in my current recipe. It browns my crust very nicely, but it does add a milky flavor that I can pick up in the crust. I am still tinkering with it to get it right. I plan on switching to skim milk powder.

I have done a good deal of experimenting with milk in pizza crusts. I have noticed a huge impact on dough flavor, in a positive way. It, however, is not a traditional flavor that I associate with pizza crust (being someone brought up on mostly NY style pizza). It also has a huge impact on crispness. This can be a blessing or a curse, depending on your oven temp, and there are times that I find it will make a pizza too crispy... while in other situations that extra crispness is exactly what I want. Dough texture is softer, almost in the same way bromated flour makes a dough lighter and more tender after cooling (I know that its technically strengthening gluten, but thats what bromate does for me). The negative of milk, is that it will bring lots of extra browning to the table, so you have to be careful of oven temps when using it. At one time, I was using a very small amount of dry milk for pizzas with a 700-750 ish degree floor. Surprising, after my previous comment. As long as the pies were closely watched so that the bottom didn't burn, I was getting major compliments on dough texture and flavor. It definitely added crispness to what could easily end up being a floppy pizza (created by the lack of convection/drying in my electric oven). In my opinion there would be no need to use milk in a WFO because the crisp is already there. Surprisingly, I did not like what milk did when making pizza at the more traditional temps/styles that you see it being used (500 or so). This is just a personal judgement, though. Something was just off with what it did to the texture for me.. Of course, that could be exactly what someone else is looking for.

An original recipe at a deli I worked at called for 2 T of powdered milk in the basic recipe for 2 lbs of dough. It gave the browning without significantly altering the texture or taste. No cross contamination either.